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Glen M. Taggart

@GlenTaggart

interpretability researcher/ML engineer

github.com/nqgl
$25total balance
$0charity balance
$25cash balance

$0 in pending offers

About Me

I'm a computer science major turned independent interpretability researcher. I've been working to address anomalies and edge cases with sparse autoencoders to improve their performance and usefulness.

Projects

Independent research to improve SAEs (4-6 months)

Comments

Independent research to improve SAEs (4-6 months)
GlenTaggart avatar

Glen M. Taggart

4 months ago

Progress update

Small update on my current situation


Sorry for the overdue update here,

Things have been semi-stalled due to recent life events lately.

- I started getting some burnout (this was a new/confusing experience. I was enjoying what I was doing a lot, so it really took me by surprise.)

- I took some time away, did some consulting for a startup (helping them with interpretability)

- then got covid which reduced my cognition/motivation/drive for around a month, kept working for the startup at this time.

- the startup had a lot of work to do that I was positioned to do, and in my state at that time I was finding research much harder to do, but it was easier to work for someone else than to self-generate direction.

That finished up about two months ago and I was excited to finally be getting back to my research, then within a few days I got tragic news that my close family member has a bad cancer diagnosis.

Since then, I've been in shock/grief, and lost a lot of my capacity and productivity.

I feel like I'm still rebuilding myself to get back to how/who I used to be. The trend line is positive on that but there are a lot of ups and downs.

I have been working on my research again but at much slower rate/productivity level currently. I'm still very far from the level of productivity I used to have, but I'm hoping I will be more back to my full self soon.

Before all of this though, I had some exciting results and leads on things that I'm still excited about and am aiming to follow through on.

I have built a bunch of infrastructure that has made it easy for me to experiment and iterate rapidly and the investment into that really seems like it has been paying off, so I am pleased with this.

My intention is of course to extend the grant end date by the amount of time I spent away.

Transactions

ForDateTypeAmount
Independent research to improve SAEs (4-6 months)8 months agoproject donation+25
Manifund Bank11 months agowithdraw5750
Manifund Bank12 months agowithdraw45000
Manifund Bank12 months agowithdraw4250
Independent research to improve SAEs (4-6 months)12 months agoproject donation+55000